Where Cuts Don't Bleed

THE CATHERINE WHEEL (281 pp.)--Jean Stafford--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

A SEASON IN ENGLAND (304 pp.)--P. H. Newby--Knopf ($3).

SYBIL (284 pp.)--Louis Auchincloss--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Once upon a time, many good people considered that reading novels was a sin comparable to sloth. When good novelists, with the help of critics and changing times, made the habit respectable, fiction began to outsell nonfiction. During the past few years, the novel has lost ground so rapidly that 1951 may be put down in literary histories as the year of the great debate: What is the novel's future--if any? It is not entirely an academic question. Publishers are shying away from novels, and for a good publishers' reason: people are not rushing to buy them.

Three of the best of the early 1952 crop of novels explain a good deal of the public's apathy and the publishers' pessimism. All three have solid literary virtues. Failure to publish them would have been something of a cultural loss. But they give such a long chewing to such delicately small bites of human experience that readers may lose their appetite for more.

Delicate Fireworks. The best of the three is Jean Stafford's The Catherine Wheel. In two previous books, Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion (TIME, Jan. 22, 1945 & March 10, 1947), Novelist Stafford failed in her themes but established herself as probably the best young prose writer in the U.S. In her new book, the manner is still fine, but the matter is thinner than ever. The heroine of The Catherine Wheel is Katharine Congreve, rich, lovely, kind and altogether admirable. Her problem is a not uncommon one, in or out of fiction: in her late 30s and unmarried, she gets a proposal of marriage from John Shipley, like herself a rich Bostonian, and the first man she ever loved. The catch is that he is married to her cousin, that all three are old friends, and that Katharine dearly loves the three children of John and Maeve Shipley.

The whole thing is settled during a summer when the Shipleys are in Europe and Katharine has the children at her house in Maine. In prose that is gracious, sensuous and only occasionally selfconscious, Author Stafford deals with Katharine's emotional wrestle, the special despair of young Andrew Shipley, life in the big house, the crotchety local characters. But when Katharine is burned to death in a fireworks display, the tragedy is merely shocking, not moving. The Catherine Wheel is an exercise in literary grace, so delicate that the characters and problems it creates go up with the final fireworks.

Civilized Pallor. English Novelist Percy Howard Newby is another writer who has mastered the basic problems of his craft but can't seem to let his talent stretch. His Young May Moon (TIME, Jan. 15, 1951), a novel about the troubles of a young boy when his mother dies, had most of the virtues of current English writing: a silky style, warmth toward simple people, a quick eye for oddities of behavior. His new novel, A Season in England, is equally gifted, equally minor.

When Tom Passmore, a Cairo professor, goes back to England for a vacation, he calls on the parents of a dead colleague, Guy Nash. Nash had never told them about his marriage to a lovely Greek girl; he had always described his mother and father to Passmore as "little less than monsters." Passmore soon finds they are a lot better than that. Mr. Nash is a gentleman, stiff but witty; Mrs. Nash is generous-hearted, and undeceived about human nature. They take so warmly to Passmore and their son's widow that Passmore begins to understand the barrier of misunderstanding that separated the parents from their spoiled son. Newby tells his decent, civilized story effortlessly and well; but at the end its pallor and essential bloodlessness bring a shrug.

Gossip in Good Taste. The ablest U.S. disciple of Henry James and Edith Wharton in many a year is a 34-year-old Manhattan lawyer named Louis Auchincloss. His special world is inhabited by New York's oldest and richest families. He writes as an insider, and his tools are accuracy and compassion. But he takes his rich so much for granted that he never makes them a fraction as interesting as a wide-eyed outsider could, e.g., F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O'Hara.

In his new novel, Sybil, Author Auchincloss is still a sound guide to the skeletons in the closets of the chronically rich. As the story of a young woman fed up with a career of idleness, Sybil is both intelligent and persuasive. What makes his story lose effect is a detached air that sometimes turns Sybil and her circle into people talked about rather than seen. For all its urbanity, Sybil winds up as not much more than fashionable gossip, well and truly gossiped.

Novelists Stafford, Newby and Auchincloss all write about life. Each is serious, sincere, talented. But each lacks robustness, a sense of the comic and a feeling for the grainy give & take of human experience. All three tell a story well, but all tell thin ones.

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